Talk of Guilt: German Perceptions of Collective Guilt and Responsibility Following WWII

Ron Levi, University of Toronto
Ori Gilboa, University of Toronto

In the aftermath of World War II, the US military sought to distribute employment licenses for Germans in the US-Zone in the field of information dissemination – and in so doing, to review and classify the degrees or risk or reward potential employees posed for a post-War Germany. In assessing whether individuals should qualify for employment licenses in the sensitive communications sector, they relied on a range of indicators – which included psychological data (including Rorschach and Romberg tests), biographical data, physical data, and political data. Yet they also relied on writing exercises with individuals applying for licenses, writing essays on their emotional life during the Nazi era, on the future of Germany, on proposals for denazification, and what they thought about the collective guilt of the German people. This paper focuses on these written essays, which we have accessed from the personal archives of David Levy (Levy 1930-1950). We have reconstructed this dataset to distill approximately 200 profiles of applicants who applied for communication sector licenses. In addition, we have collected from the archives 30 interviews with both low-ranking Nazis and high-ranking SS officers in detention camps. For each of these 230 individuals, Levy assigned two different essay topics, making for a database of 460 essays. Approximately one-quarter of these focused specifically on the question of collective guilt, though many of the other essays speak to this question in addressing the future of Germany or denazification. As we discuss below, they offer the first database for empirically comparing how Germans thought about the problem of collective guilt depending on their own trajectories, experiences, and social positions during the war. This offers empirical insight into one of the most difficult challenges addressed by social science, law, and political thought over the twentieth century.

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 Presented in Session 78. Memory, Law, and the Politics of Historical Narrative